Have My Cake in Boston University 

By GUO YuQing

I got my offer from Boston University in my last year of Southampton. The enrollment of Master program of Economics in Boston University opened mystudent life for two years in the United States. For the first time inthe United States, I felt a huge difference between UK and US strongly and why all the people said “The United States is a free country, you can do whatever you want here’’. Not as same as Britain’s unchanging gentleman faces, People in Boston are full of passions and enthusiasm. They may show their appreciations to your outfit today or crack a kindly joke with you, even though they are just passers-by and do not even know you. While in Southampton or London, you can feel the distance between man and man; this is a kind of respect, but a little bit of disregard. Well, I feel my decision to go to the United States cannot be more correct, particularly in terms of the food. Unlike the eternally immutable fishes and chips in UK, the United States are surrounded by all kinds of restaurants from different countries. Especially the Chinese restaurant, which is really good news to me at any rate.

As one of the oldest cities in the United States, Boston is an excellent port city at the edge of the vast Atlantic, which owns many of the world’s top universities like Harvard University, MIT and Boston University along the Charles River. Among these, the Boston University (referred to as BU) is a member of the Boston Consortium for Higher Education and is categorized as an RU/VH Research University (very high research activity) in the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. The university counts seven Nobel Laureates including Martin Luther King, Jr. (PhD '55) and Elie Wiesel, 35 Pulitzer Prize winners, nine AcademyAward winners, Emmy and Tony Award winners among its faculty and alumni. BU also has MacArthur, Sloan, and Guggenheim Fellowship holders as well as American Academy of Arts and Sciences and National Academy of Sciences members among its past and present graduates and faculty.

Studying in the United States can bring you the admiration of others as well as the prejudice; it shows you the wider world but as well as the unutterable loneliness. People have often regarded overseas life as relaxed and easy, full of parties. To tell the truth, the locals usually work in that way, but just during their undergraduate period. However, as one of the international students, faced with more profound knowledge and the heavy schoolwork in my Master's program, I had to stay up late in the library to digest what I have learnt or prepare for a presentation for the next week.

Two years ago I was a complete stranger to American life and needed to strive to integrate into it. This process was always accompanied by laughter and tears. But today, I understand what so called “American Dream” is gradually. It means not only the liberty, equality or democracy, but also a belief that everyone can get a better life as long as you work hard. This year I literally graduated from Boston University and got the degree of Master of Arts in Economics, perhaps it was just the beginning of our dreams.